Out of the ashes of automotive manufacturing, Dayton, Ohio, is hoping to "re-skill" its workforce with continuing technical education.

Adam Murka holds an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (Ellen Ruppel Shell).

Every company, municipality, and government agency in America would be lucky indeed to have an Adam Murka on its payroll. Adam has the memory of a savant,
the work ethic of a dairy farmer, and the can-do attitude of a young man who has never experienced disappointment or despair.

Except that he has.

Adam, who is 28, lives and works in the town where he grew up: Dayton, Ohio. Last week he took me on a tour of the place, a city for which he harbors
enormous hope. We saw the Oregon District, with its chic shops and coffee shops and excellent taverns. We drove past the sweeping campuses of several
universities. And then we drove to Moraine to see the General Motors assembly plant.

The plant was made famous by the HBO documentary "The Last Truck." The film follows the months and weeks leading to the last day the GM plant operated, but
Adam didn't have to watch that show on cable. He witnessed it first hand. His aunts, uncles and step-father all spent most of their working lives at the
plant, as did most of the parents of Adam's childhood friends. Those adults who didn't work at GM were likely as not down the street at Delphi, making
parts for GM. Both factories are closed and empty now, hulking behemoths the size of ghost towns. Adam told me that the people of Dayton rallied to keep
out the vultures -- scrap dealers with plans to dismantle the buildings and their contents and sell it all off by the ton. The rally was successful so the
carcasses remain, picked over and lifeless, a harsh reminder that high-paying union jobs are largely a thing of the past in Dayton.

Adam sees the upside to all this. Less than a decade ago, General Motors was Ohio's largest employers, with 26,000 jobs. Today no single manufacturer can
begin to make that claim. The economy modernized and diversified, with 32 companies, foundations and universities that have 9,000 workers or more.

Adam thinks diversification is key to turning the city around, and he's working hard -- very hard -- to be part of that solution. He doesn't much truck in
lofty rhetoric. He cut his teeth in politics, working on the staff of Republican Congressman Mike Turner in Washington, D.C. But when politics started to
lose its allure, he decided to come back home. Today he's director of communications at Sinclair Community College, a remarkable institution sprawled across
fifty grassy acres about a ten-minute drive from Moraine. It's there, Adam believes, where Dayton's future lies.

Sinclair has things you'd expect in a community college, like courses in dietetics and emergency response and criminal justice and hotel management and
nursing. And it also has things you wouldn't expect, like Unmanned Aerial Vehicles 101. The college is betting that UAVs -- commonly called "drones" -- will
be in growing demand not just for military applications, but for disaster response (think fires and floods) and agricultural surveying. Adam took me to the
Sinclair UAV lab and handed me one of two UAV's the college had purchased. It was pitch black, the size (though not the shape) of a coffee table, light in
the hand and with the look and feel of a toy. Sinclair has invested heavily in every aspect of UAV operations -- from operating flight simulators to getting
federal clearance to actually fly the things in airspace above an airport in nearby Springfield. "For every drone that goes up you need a dozen analysts on
the ground to handle the data," Adam told me. "That's a lot of good jobs." Not as many as GM and Delphi provided, mind you, but at least, he said, a start.

Adam introduced me to Sinclair's President, Steven Johnson. Johnson, a farmer's son, has degrees in marketing and a Ph.D in education administration. He's
seen a lot of things in his life, lived a lot of places, and worked a lot of jobs. Like Adam he doesn't have much faith in private unions, especially
unions like the UAW that, he said, put the needs of its membership ahead of the needs of the community. Nor, he made clear, did he have much patience for
people who insisted that college be purely "academic."

"We're not Sarah Lawrence, not Wellesley," he said. "We're trying to help people get enough
education to make something of themselves, people who are financially limited, academically limited, logistically limited."

Johnson explained that the UAV
training program is part of his plan not only to prepare students for 21st-century jobs, but to promote a new educational model. "For most of
us, college is one of the few things you do only once -- you go when you're 18, stay until you're 22, and never go back," he said. "That model doesn't work for
everyone. Sinclair is a place you can come back to for the rest of your life -- to refresh, retrain. You've heard of 'just-in-time' manufacturing? This is
'just in time' education."

Apparently the good people of the larger Dayton region agree: Johnson told me that 550,000 people -- fully half of county residents -- have taken at least one
course at Sinclair. During last year's graduation ceremonies, a man stood up and claimed he'd spent 32 years getting his associate's degree, course by
course -- and he said it with pride.

While visiting Sinclair, I met a number of students. Some had lost their high-paying jobs and were retraining for new ones. Others were just starting out,
but seemed to have already adopted Johnson's philosophy -- they were dipping into college to pick up skills for the next job, anticipating that they'd
probably return to "re-skill" in the future. They have reason for optimism: a couple of months ago, Moody's Investor Services upgraded Ohio's outlook from
negative to stable, and a recent report predicts the unemployment rate -- already below the national average -- will continue to decline. Of course, the
300,000 well-paying manufacturing jobs are not coming back, nor, it seems, are a lot of well-paying jobs of any variety. The state's largest employer these
days is Walmart -- with an astonishing 50,000 workers, most of them low-paid.

Still, Adam is hopeful that Dayton will continue to rise from its recent setbacks, and that Sinclair will be part of the solution. But he is less certain
that GM will play a major role. Pulling away from the assembly plant's hulking remains, he recalled many a long afternoon spent on these grounds as a
child, waiting with his friends for dads and moms and uncles and aunts to finish up their shifts. "It's hard to believe a guy my age would be looking at a
place like this and talking about the good old days," he said, looking hard ahead. "What I'm trying to do now is everything I can to make sure what
happened here never, never happens again."

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

In analyzing Doug Jones’s surprise win, the pundit-in-chief misconstrues the race and elides his own role in Moore’s defeat.

Doug Jones’s victory in the U.S. Senate race in Alabama on Tuesday poses a quandary to Republicans at all levels—but to none more than President Trump. The results of the race demonstrate the limitations of both his political power and of his self-appointed role as pundit-in-chief. He is more interested in being right than in winning—but on Tuesday, he did neither.

The president offered a series of somewhat contradictory responses to the race between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. Late Tuesday, he tweeted:

Congratulations to Doug Jones on a hard fought victory. The write-in votes played a very big factor, but a win is a win. The people of Alabama are great, and the Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time. It never ends!

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.